Lady Midnight (14 page)

I drove through the open gate of the place unchallenged, and coasted slowly until I reached storage building number eighty-six, which matched the number on the key ring. Old school, I thought to myself. No card keys or punch codes here. I got out and unlocked Grant’s lock, and lifted the heavy metal roll-up door. It groaned open, and light fell upon the contents. Here was the dark little place whose existence I had long expected. Here, all the answers to my questions about this case had been neatly filed away. Well, that’s what I hoped, anyway.
 

As I stood there looking over the contents of the little building, I realized there really wasn’t much there. Water skis and a deep-sea rod and reel leaned against a far corner. There was also a large kerosene heater, some canvas folding chairs, and two large plastic coolers. All in all, it looked like Grant used the place to store his camping and vacation gear in the off seasons. But then there was the trunk.
 

The coolers were stacked atop it. I shoved the empty coolers to the floor, and saw that the trunk was secured with another sturdy lock. The second key from the key ring slid smoothly into its slot. The lock opened with a crisp little click.
 

Inside, there was a thick manila envelope, the same type Baucom had given me at the start of all the confusion, and a DVD in a clear plastic case. I picked up the manila envelope. It was unwieldy, overstuffed. There was money in there. Probably a hundred thousand or so, bricks of cash meticulously rubber-banded and wrapped in cellophane. I picked up the DVD, and turned it over in my hands. There was no label, not even some hasty legend scrawled in permanent black ink. But I had a sick and strange feeling that I knew what was recorded on there, just the same.
 

I put the DVD in the envelope with the money, and put both of those into my jacket pocket, and left the building, pulling the door down and locking it behind me. The only sounds were the faraway call of a crow from the trees beyond the overgrown lot, and the ceaseless whine of passing vehicles on the pavement of nearby Interstate 65.
 

* * *

I went back to the apartment off Delk Road. I wanted to tell Randy Cross what I knew and what I suspected, and to confront him with this new evidence. I wanted him to understand that his sister wasn’t a useless junkie, but a broken person, one who had carried a weight with her, heavier than even his own. He had been disowned, but she had been used repeatedly, and over many years. I wanted him to know they both had been broken by the same man, and perhaps that was the strength of the bond they shared.
 

Randy Cross wasn’t in. He’d left by that most mortal and permanent of means. I found him in the front room, beside the sofa where we had spoken before. He’d been shot in the back, twice. His face was still warm to the touch. I stood over him for a moment, at a complete loss. I did the math. Pitman was dead, and so was Grant. Neither of them had done this. That left Big Daddy and his buddy Vince. They were trying to cover their tracks.
 

There was a pretty expensive-looking entertainment center in front of the couch. I removed the DVD from the envelope and went over and slid the disc into the player. I sat down and picked up the remote. The screen went blue and then black, then filled with static. After a few seconds, images materialized out of the snow, like phantoms appearing out of a heavy fog.
 

Images of a young Connie filled the screen. She was maybe fourteen. She was quietly sitting on her bad looking into the lens, and past, at whoever held the camera. Her eyes were large. After a few seconds, she was joined onscreen by a younger Senator Patrick. I had a sick feeling that I knew what was coming next. Even as my hand went up to shut off the player, my suspicions were confirmed. The Senator began undressing his daughter, who sat still as a statue, not struggling or complying, simply staring. Apparently, she had known what was coming next, even at the tender age this video had captured in her life. That meant one thing, that whatever was about to happen had happened to her before.
 

I turned off the player and stared at the hissing static of the screen. So here was the secret that was worth envelopes full of money. Grant had been hired to find Connie, and had uncovered Senator Patrick’s dirtiest secret instead. Grant had used Connie instead of saving her, and he had made some sort of a deal with Big Daddy so that they could use her, and keep on using her, to squeeze money from Senator Patrick. Grant had blackmailed Patrick, and hadn’t needed Nookie’s bright idea to do it. Why had Bowman died? Why had he been in Birmingham on that rainy morning?
 

And suddenly it came to me, and it wasn’t a good thing to know.
 

I went to my car and got the diary. I hadn’t read it, and suddenly that seemed like a colossal blunder on my part. I’d been so centered on Bowman and Grant that I’d ignored what Connie might have been able to tell me. I took it out now and opened it, a little pink and purple girl’s journal with hearts and flowers on the binding, and my hands trembled slightly, because I realized that I was afraid, afraid now of what I might find inside, what had been waiting inside for me to find, all along.
 

I flipped to the last few entries and read:
 

I think this time was a mistake.
 

I looked at the entry again, as if staring at the same words could coax new meaning from them, and I realized that was a dangerous business, that I might read things into that simple statement that weren’t really there. I flipped the page, and there was another entry, equally enigmatic, in the same hand, this time in purple ink:
 

I always get what I want. I always get what I want.
 

But sometimes I don’t like what I do to get it . . . I am going to make another movie. Maybe if I feel dirty enough and get high enough it won’t matter anyway. I won’t think about it after a while if I stay away from him.
 

There seemed once again to be more in the things that Connie had left unwritten than the things she had written. In the ellipses, the empty spaces, she had considered her own thoughts, thoughts that had not reached the pen and the page. She had left out the very things that I desperately needed to know.

I was about to give up on Connie’s diary, thinking that her sporadic and unexplained missives were too ambiguous to be of any use to me in my quest to find her, when I turned the page once again. The next entry hit me like a sucker punch in a dark alley:
Daddy got me pregnant this time.
 

It was a simple statement, as simple as the others, but without one drop of ambiguity, no words left out, no private meaning, yet I found myself reading it again, and my sanity begging me to read it differently. There it was, simple, direct, the expression of unutterable human pain scribbled in a pen like a little girl would use to write the name of a band she likes on the back of her junior high notebook. But here the novelty ink had been used to record this blasphemy against the family, this profanity against what a father was supposed to be.
 

This was the one monumental truth that I had been chasing since the day I’d sat in Sally’s diner and watched a man die for also knowing the truth. This was the thing Patrick was trying desperately to contain, this career-ending crime that he had committed, this unpardonable and unconscionable act that he had done to his own flesh and blood, this secret that would get him hounded from office and public life if it were to ever become known:
Daddy got me pregnant this time.
 

I have to find her, I have to save her, I thought as I stared at those six terrible words that I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away from. So many dead now, and for this, I thought. And Patrick—a liar, user, molester, and a hundred other unnamed things. Everything that he had told me had been a lie.
 

Suddenly I found that I was very angry. I closed the little book gently, and got up from there. I had the truth now. Randy Cross’s drunken smile came back to me. He had been right. I had been in the dark, but now that I was in the light, I found that it wasn’t a very pleasant place to be.

Chapter 20

At the foot of the stairs is the door that leads to the room where they keep her. She came here of her own free will, but now they have her restrained with leather straps. They had to strap her down after she got coked up one night and dropped some H and some X, which is never a good idea, took them both together to restrain her after she got really screwed up and started telling everyone at the party how she’d lost her father’s baby, and then she smashed the glass top table with a big ashtray and sat right there in the floor and tried to slash her wrists with a big piece of broken glass.
 

They had called Grant over and he had come down with some Mexican who was a doctor in the old country but couldn’t practice in the USA, so he worked as a landscaper in Grant’s neighborhood. The old Mexican had fixed her up and given her a sedative and after he’d left, Grant and Big Daddy had talked and they had decided they’d keep her under wraps until she looked a little more presentable.
 

Grant had left that night, but he sent the Mexican doctor around periodically to keep Connie medicated and under control. “Get her cleaned up,” Grant had told Vince and Big Daddy. “Don’t give her any more coke, or anything else, for that matter. You guys are playing with fire. What if she dies next time? There goes our cash cow.”
 

There was a time not very long ago that Big Daddy would have laughed at such a remark, but something had happened to him in prison, because he had stood there and thought to himself,
That ain’t no way to talk about her, she’s just a kid and she could have died
.
 

Big Daddy went over and stood by the sleeping girl. She looked like an angel, he thought. He wanted very badly to untie her, give her some clothes and some money, and tell her to get the hell out of there. Tell her she had her whole life ahead of her, and if she stayed off the junk she’d make out O.K. Big Daddy wanted very much to do that, and at one point his hands even went down to the restraint that held the dainty wrist lashed to the headboard.
 

But.
 

He glanced nervously back to the door. If Vince found the girl gone he’d go out of his mind. He would probably shoot me, Big Daddy told himself, friends or no friends.
 

He remembered all too well the conversation that he and Vince had already had concerning the girl and her fate. After Grant had left on the night of Connie’s overdose and attempted suicide, Big Daddy had told Vince that they should get rid of the girl. “Having her here is a big risk to your business, Vince,” Big Daddy has said. “Grant’s calling the shots, too, when it should be you doing it. I say we get her out of here.”
 

“Nothing doing,” Vince had responded flatly.
 

Nothing bad, Big Daddy had argued; just dump her off one night at Senator Patrick’s house. They were making plenty of cash with the Internet porn, he pointed out. Why did they need the money from Patrick? They could stay legit, and no one could touch them.
 

“Having her tied up down there, and that Mexican quack coming around will bring nothing but trouble, Vince,” Big Daddy had pleaded, but Vince would not be moved.

Vince had patted Big Daddy on the cheek. “It’s not just the money,” Vince had told him, like he was talking to a child. “It’s about having our very own senator, our very own governor. Somebody who’ll protect our interests from the bible-thumpers and the concerned moms when they try to shut us down. We’re playing in the big leagues, now. You just let me run things, and keep making your little movies.”
 

The condescending tone of the remark had annoyed Big Daddy, but he’d kept his mouth shut. Vince was Number One now. This wasn’t the old days, when he’d run book and girls in the North Side of Birmingham and Vince had taken orders from him. Now Vince was in charge. Big Daddy knew that if he made waves, Vince could kick him out, and he’d be back in the joint like lightning— and he’d stay there for a long time.
 

But looking down at the girl, shivering and naked in the dirty little bed, he suddenly didn’t feel so lucky, anymore. He thought about the girl who he and Vince had overdosed all those years before, the girl whose death had earned him his trip to the big house. Why is it that one person’s ticket to Shangri-La often means another’s ticket to the grave. Maybe it just works that way. It’s really too bad. He didn’t like it, though; he didn’t like being a part of it. Big Daddy wished suddenly he could get clear of it all, somehow, but he had no idea how to do that.
 

Big Daddy pulled a sheet up over Connie Patrick and turned out the light. “You sleep now, pretty girl,” he said softly, though he was sure she couldn’t hear him, in whatever hell she caught in. Then Big Daddy pulled the door closed, and went away from there.

Chapter 21

I was on the move. I took out my cell phone and dialed a number. A girl’s voice answered.
 

“Roland?” It was Nookie. Her voice was small, and something else . . . afraid.
 

“Yeah, it’s me.”